Puns and other obsessions. A trip inside an OCD mind.

Fighting Back: The Road to Emotional Bliss

The worst feeling I have ever felt. Worse than giving birth. Worse than being hit in the testicles….with a chair! That feeling I am talking about is the one a person gets when he fights back, when he doesn’t comply with the obsessions and tries not to think of them. It sounds simple enough. Oh no it isn’t….It’s tough. It’s hard. It’s tiring….paralyzing….debilitating….but it is the only way out. In the short run it sucks so bad it makes you feel so much better in the long run.

I am writing about this as I have been going through this recently. I have done it before but not this intense and not on such a broad scale; I have been exposing myself and fighting my obsessive thoughts and behavior. I’ve had to have an increase in my medication dosage in order to help with the fight. The medication cannot (in my case that is) do all the work; cure you and let you stop getting intrusive thoughts and being obsessed. The medication at first provides a stepping stone and a launching pad, and then becomes an agent responsible for giving the person with OCD an extra push. The individual with OCD has a lot of work to do, depending on how far he is in his obsessive behavior. This is a fight of epic proportions. It’s one fighting one’s self; his own thoughts, and his own feelings. And to see results you have to suffer. And suffer you shall. It’s the only way out.

I start heavy breathing; I feel like my lung is going to come out of my ass. My heart starts beating faster than a cheetah on cocaine. Tiny droplets of sweat start forming on the top of my forehead. I feel a warm sensation in my chest and a knot in my stomach. I get fidgety and I start to nervously shake my foot. I start getting thoughts that only get worse by the second. I keep on thinking or wanting to think. I start feeling like the walls are getting closer and tighter. Important things start to seem unimportant and trivial. I start feeling a dark feeling; an unpleasant, unwelcomed feeling. I’m now anxious and depressed. I can’t control that when it comes. What I can do is fight back. I just don’t give the obsession the time of day. I don’t give it any attention; I just treat it like a Raja in a room filled with cute girls (don’t laugh at my misery). It sounds pretty easy. Au contraire!!! It really is the absolute opposite.

You get the obsessive thought. You say I’m not thinking about it. At first it starts easy. Every second it gets harder and harder. It reaches a point where it tries to force you to think of it. It makes you feel like if this isn’t resolved, it is the end of the world, and your life will never be the same, and you will always feel gloomy and depressed. It goes on to hijack your whole thought process. Your whole mind. Your whole brain. You can’t think of other stuff. The thought is lurking in the back of your head. It never wants to leave, and it seems as if it will always bother you unless you resolve it by thinking or doing its compulsion. You feel paralyzed. Getting out of bed seems so hard, discomforting, and damn scary. You don’t feel like eating, talking to anyone, getting out of the house, or even taking a shower. Even if you wanted to use the bathroom for when nature calls, you keep pushing it back until your bladder is about to burst. Doing anything while having a thought lurk in the background of the mind, will give you more depression as you feel like you want to enjoy what you’re doing but can’t. You feel like you are wasting your time and emotions. That’s the trick the mind plays. It makes us think the end is near and gives us doomed thinking, all in order to let us submit to the obsessions. This intense and severe discomfort is normal when fighting back. Believe me it won’t last forever. When I fought back it first took months to feel better, the second time it took weeks, then days, then hours, and now some take minutes. The time to get over it and feel normal depends on how severe the thought is and how much time of day you have given it.

In closing I say don’t succumb to the thoughts. The thoughts YOU DO NOT generate should not be allowed to take over. Fight them. You may lose sometimes, but fight nevertheless, even if you broke down while fighting it; the time spent from when you started fighting to when you broke down is so helpful in the future. Baby steps. Believe me every second spent fighting will help. Just be ready to go through hell because that’s what it feels like in order to cross to emotional bliss.